Coppers have always done revenue enhancement patrols. Doesn't make it right, but it's common. The Florida Highway Patrol has been one of the more brazen participants in this nonsense, so much so that troopers were given dollar quotas to meet. That supposedly has been stopped, but other less obvious forms of quotas took their place.

You want revenue enhancement? Drive I-75 through Georgia, and count the cop cars along the so-called construction zones. You know, the miles and miles of barricades with not a soul working. I have no problem slowing when workers are actually out there, but passing by mile after mile of abandoned construction zones, patrolled heavily by every jurisdiction along the right of way, is just wrong.

Speaking of Florida’s highways and byways, I’m sometimes moved to wonder whether
seemingly unrelated events may actually bear some previously unseen connection.

H/t to Dday @ Digby

Are you saying Floridians want Bush to RUN?
Isn't that... like... blasphemy in the liberal world?

No. On the contrary.

Piety?

;'O)

perhaps it's just a sign of the times... tickets that is... not shoes.

It's been hard not noticing the increased fines and tolerance in my area. It's been slowly getting worse here over the years. In fact I got a ticket the other night from the city for not moving my car with 12 hours of parking it. According to the illustrious city of Bettendorf, it is their new policy to ticket, and when arguing the fine with the BPD Lietenant, he even informed me that they have the right to tow my vehicle within 24 hours of parking my car.

The kicker is that the city hadn't plowed off my street all day and that due to that my Camaro (the perfect winter car... :o) got stuck in a foot and a half tall snow drift right at the end of my street. Thanks to my neighbors and some shovels, I got it moved alongside the curb... but then later that night the plows finally came through and BURIED my car in a snow/slush mixture 3 foot tall and covering my hood. It was a block of ice by morning. Hood, door, rear end, covered. The next night at 3:00 am they sent the rookies out with tickets and a goal. Fifteen (15) of my neighbors got tickets that night, and a message on their answering machine informing them that their vehicle would be towed at our cost and stored in lock up... a.k.a... more tax dollars. All got messages except for me, for they called the house I was parked in front of instead and wouldn't have found out about it had my neighbor not come over at 8 pm and informed me of it.

We weren't in snow routes, we weren't in no parking zones, just the usual spots we park in everyday, except for me who was parked where the neighbor usually parks. It truly was an abuse of power and a slimy way to get an extra $5 a pop. Our city used to have more important things to do, but it seems now that they've resorted to make paying for their projects, their bills and ridiculous spending their primary objective. "Law enforcement" is slowly being replaced by red light cameras, parking tickets, speed traps, random vehicle checks and making sure the grass has been mowed and the sidewalks shoveled.

It's nice have a police department that staffs so many officers that most never have to wait more than a couple minutes before 2 squad cars have arrived, but it's another thing if we have to resort to all time lows to afford them.

Have you not ever heard of a shoe storm? Happens all the time. The result of shuhumidorfidus clouds being formed by shoes being thrown in the air and disappearing. Over time the accumulation becomes so great that ................ well, you know the rest of the story.

I love being stopped by the police because I know I'm gonna be sober. Just love handing'em my DL and saying "how ya doin officer, great day ain't it?" "Move along sir, we've got business to conduct here." "Oh, yes sir, didn't mean to be takin up your valuable time like that. Have a good day now yahear." :)

that's because you're not young.
It's never that easy for me, and it probably never will be...
i'm cursed with a baby face... 31 and confused for 19... often.

if i get pulled over, i'm stuck waiting... and waiting... while the research...
then if they are really bored they wanna search my car...
just because the found something in my friend's YEARs ago...
and of course you look guilty if you say no...

it makes me pretty happy.

I used to get stopped all the time when I was 21, 22, etc. Had a Corvette, and to the cops a punk kid in a 'Vette was like a big flashing sign saying, "This kid needs hassling."

One night, when I knew absolutely that I had done nothing wrong, a sour cop tried about 6 different "violations" on me, until I finally lost it and told him he was full of crap, and that he should just arrest me and tell the judge all about it. He sputtered a bit more, and let me go.

Most cops are good people, but this guy was a jerk. Or maybe his wife just tossed him out. Who knows?

I had this sent to me from a kind reader of ours... please read:

By Todd C. Frankel

ST. LOUIS — The economist got a speeding ticket, and it got him thinking about why.

Thomas A. Garrett, an assistant vice president at the St. Louis Federal Reserve, knew he deserved to be ticketed while on vacation in Pennsylvania a few years ago. But, he wondered, are traffic tickets purely about public safety? Or are other factors at play?

Many drivers probably have wondered the same thing sitting on a highway shoulder waiting for a citation. But Garrett turned it into a scholarly pursuit. He decided to conduct a study.

What Garrett and a co-author discovered provides yet another reason to hate a recession.

Traffic tickets go up significantly when local government revenue falls, they found. Their study showed for the first time evidence of how “local governments behave, in part, as though traffic tickets are a revenue tool to help offset periods of fiscal distress.”

No surprise, some ticketed drivers might say. But Garrett and co-author Gary A. Wagner, an economist at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, say they confirmed a connection that seemed to exist only in isolated

anecdotes. And they put a number on it: Controlling for other factors, a 1 percentage point drop in local government revenue leads to a roughly .32 percentage point increase in the number of traffic tickets in the following year, a statistically significant connection.

So in the middle of a recession, with almost all cities and counties facing falling sales and property taxes, “you would expect more traffic tickets,” Garrett said from his office in downtown St. Louis.

“When things are bad,” Garrett said, “traffic tickets go up.”

The study, titled “Red Ink in the Rearview Mirror,” will be published next month in the Journal of Law and Economics. It examined 14 years of data from 96 North Carolina counties. (Garrett’s co-author was living in North Carolina at the time.)

In North Carolina, as in many states, ticket fines are retained at the local level. The study authors looked to exclude the distorting effects of traffic enforcement campaigns and county population differences. They tried to take into consideration the effects of police per capita, population density, tourism and median family income.

In fact, they uncovered even more connections between ticket-writing and local economic conditions. If the county unemployment rate went up, so did the number of tickets. “This suggests that ... the timing of traffic tickets tends to mimic changes in county-wide economic conditions,” the authors wrote.

Garrett said the study does not dispute that public safety remains at the heart of ticket-writing. But, he said, the study shows that political and economic interests affect how much emphasis is placed on writing tickets.

“It seems quite reasonable to me that city officials communicate to police departments” the need for more ticket revenue, Garrett said.

The study found support from the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, which frequently complains about ticketing campaigns.

“It’s no surprise to a trucker that local governments are using (traffic) violations as fundraisers,” said Norita Taylor, a spokeswoman for the national truckers group, based outside Kansas City, Mo.

The National Motorists Association, a drivers’ rights group in Wisconsin, also has seen anecdotal evidence that local governments “have their fingers in that ticket pie,” group President Jim Baxter said.

In the world of economists, the relationship between traffic tickets and local government budgets is expected — rational, even. It has to do with incentives. Researchers previously have found police make many more drug-related arrests when they are able to retain seized assets.

Also, Garrett said, local governments squeezed for money are under pressure to find new ways of raising new revenue. They cannot raise taxes in a recession. So they look to things such as lottery sales, casino gambling and hotel occupancy taxes. These are “hidden taxes” — revenues generated mostly by nonvoters and nonresidents. Traffic tickets fit the bill.

“It is a politically appealing way of generating revenue,” Garrett said.

And there is no shortage of traffic tickets being handed out. In 2006, 55.6 million traffic and ordinance violation cases were filed across the country, according to the National Center for State Courts. That is an increase of 9 percent from 1997.

But don’t expect an economic recovery to slow the traffic stops.

According to Garrett’s study, the number of tickets does not go back down when good times return.

The local paper is running an article now about this. The local police departments are taking the p.c. route and comparing themselves to the likeness of "St. Nick." Uh huh.... can't make this up. I'd love to show Phil Reddington my ticket and photo of the block of ice covering my car. The couldn't even put the ticket under my windshield wipers because there was ice completely covering those as well. The stuck it in door crack.

I declare bullshit.

Waldo, Florida is nationally known as a vicious speed trap. Now, the Chamber of Commerce is fighting back against the city government, claiming that the negative reputation is hurting business.

This is fun to watch. Unlike driving into Waldo, which is pretty much not fun.

Revenue enhancement in Waldo